Nesta - The UK's Innovation Agency
The Policy Fix | How to fix our broken food system
Right now in the UK, around two-thirds of all adults are living with excess weight and obesity. This is not just a crisis for adults - more than one in 5 primary school-aged children in England are...
Leading the food system through change: delivering the healthy food standard
As we approached the one-year anniversary of the announcement of the policy in the government's 10 Year Health Plan, we hosted a panel of experts to share views on what is needed to ensure the poli...
Why a narrow rejoin vote could backfire
Professor Anand Menon warns that a knife edge rejoin referendum could do more harm than good. Continental Europe never saw 52/48 as decisive, and a rejoin vote that just squeaks over the line would...
Why the EU won’t make life easy for Britain
Professor Anand Menon explains the EU’s incentive to hold a hard line. With populists like France’s Rassemblement National and Germany’s AfD at home, the last thing Brussels wants is to make life o...
How can it still be Brexit? The focus group moment that says it all
Professor Anand Menon on why winning a rejoin argument is so hard. To shift opinion you would need to repeat Nigel Farage’s trick of linking Europe to an issue people really care about, such as imm...
An economist’s verdict: rejoining the EU is the strongest option
Economist Tim Leunig gives a clear economic answer: rejoining the EU as a full member, on the right terms, is the strongest option for the UK economy. Whether that is worth the real price on sovere...
If AI cannot shrink the civil service, it will not be funded
AI initiatives in government cannot exist in a vacuum. James Kuht argues that departments need to be crystal clear about what their AI programme will replace, because the civil service cannot keep ...
The UK's big bets on AI: health, education and the state's unique role
Where should the UK government focus its AI ambitions? Mallory Durran argues for laser focus on a small number of high-stakes areas, including healthcare outcomes and educational attainment, where ...
Getting people over the imagination gap with AI
Training alone is not enough. James Kuht argues the real challenge is helping civil servants cross the imagination gap: understanding what it actually means to have access to something approaching ...
The AI frontier shifts every three months. Government needs to keep up
Static AI training programmes are already out of date before they finish. James Kuht argues that civil servants need to constantly reevaluate what is possible with AI, because the frontier moves fa...
Insource or outsource AI? Why it does not have to be either-or
The real answer to building AI capability in government is not a binary choice between insourcing and outsourcing. Mallory Durran explains why smart partnership working, where private sector expert...
AI is the chance to fix what digital transformation missed
The AI opportunity is not just about what AI can do. It is also a chance to go back and fix the digital infrastructure, joined-up data and governance that previous transformation programmes left be...
The best way to manage AI risk? Get people using it
Experimentation is underrated as a risk management tool. James Kuht explains why simply getting civil servants to use AI tools builds the most valuable skill of all: knowing where AI is genuinely u...
Why the Ministry of Justice is the envy of UK government
Not all government departments are created equal when it comes to digital maturity. Mallory Durran explains why the Ministry of Justice became a front-runner in cloud analytics and digital transfor...
The one thing successful government AI programmes have in common
Whether it is improving citizen services or increasing planning application approvals, the departments that get AI right share one trait: clarity of purpose from the top. James Kuht, CEO of Pair an...
AI will make some people very rich. But will it help everyone?
AI is almost certain to drive economic growth. But economic growth for whom? Mallory Durran, head of Applied Research at Nesta, warns that better citizen experiences and genuine public value are no...
Government cannot fire its customers. So how does it take risks with AI?
Private sector startups can cut unprofitable customers and move fast. Government cannot. James Kuht on why public sector AI adoption requires a fundamentally different approach to risk, and what th...
You need technical leaders, not just trained generalists
Upskilling existing staff is necessary but not sufficient. Mallory Durran makes the case for a different kind of senior leader: someone with deep technical expertise who also has the decision-makin...
The Policy Fix | How to make the UK a world leader in public sector AI
The UK has no shortage of AI strategies, summits and action plans. But a stack of policy papers doesn't retrain a civil servant, fix a legacy data system, or scale a pilot beyond a single departmen...
How to scale social innovations: building a delivery network
Too many promising social innovations fail to reach their full potential. While early-stage pilots often show strong results, they can struggle to scale due to the absence of a robust and sustained...